Isn't This Fun: Investigating the Serious Business of Enjoying Ourselves

Michael Foley wants to understand why he doesn't appear to be experiencing as much fun as everyone else. So, with characteristic wit and humour, he sets out to understand what fun really means, examining its heritage, its cultural significance and the various activities we associate with fun. He investigates pursuits such as dancing, sex, holidays, sport, gaming and comedy and concludes that fun is not easy, simple and fixed, as many seem to believe, but elusive, complex and constantly changing.

The Persuaders

Every day many people will try to change your mind, but they won't reason with you. Instead you'll be nudged, anchored, incentivised and manipulated in barely noticeable ways. It's a profound shift in the way we interact with one another. Philosopher James Garvey explores the hidden story of persuasion and the men and women in the business of changing our minds.

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate

We seem to have given up on any serious effort to prevent catastrophic climate change. Exposing the work of ideologues on the right who know the challenge this poses to the free market all too well, Naomi Klein also challenges the failing strategies of environmental groups. It's time to stop running from the full implications of the crisis and begin to embrace them.

The Idiot Brain: A Neuroscientist Explains What Your Head Is Really up To

Why do you lose arguments with people who know MUCH LESS than you? Why can you recognise that woman, from that thing...but can't remember her name? And why, after your last break-up, did you find yourself in the foetal position on the sofa for days, moving only to wipe the snot and tears haphazardly from your face? Here's why: the idiot brain. For something supposedly so brilliant and evolutionarily advanced, the human brain is pretty messy, fallible and disorganised.

What We Cannot Know

Britain's most famous mathematician takes us to the edge of knowledge to show us what we cannot know. Science is king. Every week headlines announce new breakthroughs in our understanding of the universe, new technologies that will transform our environment, new medical advances that will extend our lives. Science is giving us unprecedented insight into some of the big questions that have challenged humanity ever since we've been able to formulate those questions.

The Science of Energy: Resources and Power Explained

To better put into perspective the various issues surrounding energy in the 21st century, you need to understand the essential science behind how energy works. And you need a reliable source whose focus is on giving you the facts you need to form your own educated opinions.

Messy

The urge to be tidy seems to be rooted deep in the human psyche. Many of us feel threatened by anything that is vague, unplanned, scattered around or hard to describe. We find comfort in having a script to rely on, a system to follow, in being able to categorise and file away. We all benefit from tidy organisation - up to a point. A large library needs a reference system. Global trade needs the shipping container. Scientific collaboration needs measurement units. But the forces of tidiness have marched too far.

It's All in Your Head: Stories from the Frontline of Psychosomatic Illness

Pauline first became ill when she was 15. What seemed to be a urinary infection became joint pain, then life-threatening appendicitis. After a routine operation, Pauline lost all the strength in her legs. Shortly afterwards, convulsions started. But Pauline's tests are normal: her symptoms seem to have no physical cause whatsoever. This may be an extreme case, but Pauline is not alone. As many as a third of people visiting their GPs have symptoms that are medically unexplained.

The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

The previous edition of this now-classic book revealed the existence and subversive manipulations of "economic hit men". John Perkins wrote that economic hit men (EHM) "are highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. Their tools include fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex, and murder".

The Elephant in the Room: A Journey into the Trump Campaign and the "Alt-Right"

'But Hillary is a known Luciferian,' he tried. 'She's not a known Luciferian,' I said. 'Well, yes and no,' he said. In The Elephant in the Room, Jon Ronson, the New York Times best-selling author of The Psychopath Test, Them and So You've Been Publicly Shamed, travels to Cleveland at the height of summer to witness the Republican National Convention.

From the world's leading expert in forensic cyberpsychology - a discipline that combines psychology, forensics and technology - comes a groundbreaking exploration of the impact of technology on human behaviour. The average person now checks their phone over 200 times a day. That's a serious addiction - but because we're all doing it all the time, it doesn't seem quite so scary. And, like all addicts, we have avoided thinking about the implications of the cyber effect.

If I Could Tell You Just One Thing: Encounters with Remarkable People and Their Most Valuable Advice

Richard Reed built Innocent Drinks from a smoothie stall on a street corner to one of the biggest brands in Britain. He credits his success to four brilliant pieces of advice, each given to him just when he needed them most. Ever since, it has been Richard's habit, whenever he meets somebody he admires, to ask them for their best piece of advice. If they could tell him just one thing, what would it be? Richard has collected pearls of wisdom from some of the most remarkable, inspiring and game-changing people in the world.

Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise

Anders Ericsson has spent 30 years studying the special ones - the geniuses, sports stars and musical prodigies. And his remarkable finding, revealed in Peak, is that their special abilities are acquired through training. The innate 'gift' of talent is a myth. Exceptional individuals are born with just one unique ability, shared by us all - the ability to develop our brains and bodies through our own efforts.

PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future

From Paul Mason, the award-winning Channel 4 presenter, PostCapitalism is a guide to our era of seismic economic change and how we can build a more equal society. Over the past two centuries or so, capitalism has undergone continual change - economic cycles that lurch from boom to bust - and has always emerged transformed and strengthened. Surveying this turbulent history, Paul Mason wonders whether today we are on the brink of a change so big, so profound, that this time capitalism itself has reached its limits.

Catastrophe: Europe Goes to War 1914

The Amazon History Book of the Year 2013 is a magisterial chronicle of the calamity that befell Europe in 1914 as the continent shifted from the glamour of the Edwardian era to the tragedy of total war. Nineteen fourteen was a year of unparalleled change. The year that diplomacy failed, imperial Europe was thrown into its first modernised warfare and white-gloved soldiers rode in their masses across pastoral landscapes into the blaze of machine guns. What followed were the costliest days of the entire war.

At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails

Paris, near the turn of 1933. Three young friends meet over apricot cocktails at the Bec-de-Gaz bar on the rue Montparnasse. They are Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and their friend Raymond Aron, who opens their eyes to a radical new way of thinking. Pointing to his drink, he says, 'You can make philosophy out of this cocktail!'

The Path: A New Way to Think About Everything

In the first book of its kind, The Path draws on the work of six of the great - but largely unknown - Chinese philosophers to offer a fresh and revolutionary guide to human flourishing. By examining the teachings of Chinese thinkers and explaining what they reveal about our daily lives - from greeting others to raising children - The Path challenges some of our deepest held assumptions.

The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a F**k

A brilliant, hilarious homage to The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, showing how to shed your mental clutter for good. Aimed at overachieving but dissatisfied people everywhere. Sarah's inspirational two-step 'NotSorry' program shows how unleashing the power of not giving a f**k will help you shed unwanted guilt and obligations to redirect time, energy and enthusiasm to your true priorities.

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

Yuval Noah Harari, author of the best-selling Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, envisions a not-too-distant world in which we face a new set of challenges. Now, in Homo Deus, he examines our future with his trademark blend of science, history, philosophy and every discipline in between. Homo Deus explores the projects, dreams and nightmares that will shape the 21st century - from overcoming death to creating artificial life.

The Achievement Habit: Stop Wishing, Start Doing, and Take Command of Your Life

Based on a legendary course Roth has taught at Stanford University for several decades, The Achievement Habit employs the remarkable insights that stem from design thinking to help us realize the power we all have within to change our lives for the better. By ridding ourselves of issues that stand in the way of reaching our full potential, we gain the confidence finally to do things we've always wanted to do.

Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us

A book that will change how you think and transform how you live.Forget everything you thought you knew about how to motivate people - at work, at school, at home. It is wrong. As Daniel H. Pink explains in his paradigm-shattering book Drive, the secret to high performance and satisfaction in today's world is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and the world.

The Happiness Advantage

Our most commonly held formula for success is broken. Conventional wisdom holds that if we work hard we will be more successful, and if we are more successful, then we'll be happy. If we can just find that great job, win that next promotion, lose those five pounds, happiness will follow. But recent discoveries in the field of positive psychology have shown that this formula is actually backward; happiness fuels success, not the other way around.

Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First

What we consume has become the defining feature of our lives: our economies live or die by spending, we are treated more as consumers than workers and even public services are presented to us as products in a supermarket. In this monumental study, acclaimed historian Frank Trentmann unfolds the extraordinary history that has shaped our material world, from late Ming China, Renaissance Italy and the British Empire to the present.

Happy

Everyone says they want to be happy. But that's much more easily said than done. What does being happy actually mean? And how do you even know when you feel it? Across the millennia, philosophers have thought long and hard about happiness. They have defined it in many different ways and come up with myriad strategies for living the good life. Drawing on this vast body of work, in Happy Derren Brown explores changing concepts of happiness - from the surprisingly modern wisdom of the Stoics and Epicureans in classical times right up until today.

Publisher's Summary

What was a Buddhist monk doing at the 2014 World Economic Forum in Davos lecturing the world's leaders on mindfulness? Why do many successful corporations have a chief happiness officer? What can the chemical composition of your brain tell a potential employer about you?

In the past decade, governments and corporations have become increasingly interested in measuring the way people feel: the Happiness index, Gross National Happiness, well-being and positive psychology have come to dominate the way we live our lives. As a result, our emotions have become a new resource to be bought and sold.

In a fascinating investigation combining history, science and ideas, William Davies shows how well-being influences all aspects of our lives: business, finance, marketing and smart technology.

This audiobook will make you rethink everything from the way you work, the power of the Nudge, the ever-expanding definitions of depression, and the commercialization of your most private feelings. The Happiness Industry is a shocking and brilliantly argued warning about the new religion of the age: our emotions.

What the Critics Say

"Deeply researched and pithily argued, Davies's work is a welcome corrective to the glut of semi-scientific happiness books that have become so popular in business and management circles, and which rarely, if ever, acknowledge the larger ideological goals of workplace well-being." (New York Magazine)"When the 18th-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham suggested that maximising happiness was the job of government, he inspired a quest to measure happiness that continues today. Until recently, the only effective tool for that - as the political scientist Will Davies explains in a forceful new book, The Happiness Industry - has been money." (Observer)"As Davies implies in this readable, disturbing book, being depressed by the human condition will no longer be socially acceptable, or even an option. The state or big business will soon see to it!" (Independent)

This seemed like a fascinating subject but although it certainly was thought-provoking, raising some very valid points, I felt that it could have been done better. It felt like too much emphasis was placed on the history of utilitarianism without sufficiently clarifying the connection to the modern day "happiness industry". This is not to say I disagreed. I could definitely see the author's point. However, I just feel it could have been made better.

On the narration: I know that it's hard to find the right tone when narrating a book on this subject. I don't know however, if there is any need to sound literally depressed as one is doing the reading. It actually did make the listening experience worse.